Before You Start: Teams, Timings and Kit
The decision that most affects the evening is team size. Four to six is the working range. Below four the specialist rounds land unfairly, because a table of two either happens to contain someone who has read Dracula or it does not. Above six, the far end of the table stops contributing and starts talking, which is the noise that ruins a quiz for everyone else. Left with an odd number, make one team of seven rather than one of three.
Forty-seven questions is close to the ceiling for one evening. At a sensible pace with each question read twice they take about 45 minutes; marking adds roughly five minutes between rounds, and a break after Round Three adds ten to fifteen. Fix the break's end time in advance: a ten-minute break that runs to twenty-five is the commonest reason a quiz night overruns.
Score one point per question, no half points, nothing for spelling, and announce standings only after Rounds Two, Three and Five. Teams swap sheets one table to the left so nobody marks their own, and you collect everything at the end to check the totals. Beyond paper, pens and a phone to read from, the only preparation worth doing is reading the quiz aloud once and settling how you will pronounce Samhain and cempasúchil.
Round One — The Warm-Up: Pumpkins, Candy and Costumes
Start this round before the last teams have finished at the bar; it is designed so nobody feels stupid at the beginning of the evening. Read each question twice, leave about twenty seconds, and do not take questions from the floor. One point each, no half points, no bonus for spelling. A competent team should take five or six of these seven — if the room is averaging two, you have a quiet crowd and should read more slowly for the rest of the night. Do not announce any scores until the end of Round Two, so the first standings you read out already have some spread in them.
Two answers reward care. Candy corn is dated loosely on purpose: the sweet was invented in the 1880s, with the Wunderle Candy Company usually credited with first production in 1888, while accounts differ over whether the "Chicken Feed" name goes back to that original or belongs to the Goelitz era from 1898. And the trick-or-treat answer is Canada, not the United States: the earliest known print appearance is a Canadian newspaper item, from the Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1917, and the other early sightings are Canadian too.
Q1.Which vegetable was carved into lanterns in Ireland and Scotland before pumpkins were used?Tap to reveal
Answer: The turnip
Q2.Candy corn was sold in the 1880s under what original name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chicken Feed
Though the documented "Chicken Feed" branding dates from the Goelitz era (1898 onward), not the 1880s; the 1880s is the invention date
Q3.Which confectionery company, known today as Jelly Belly, began mass-producing candy corn in 1898?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Goelitz Confectionery Company
Q4.What three colours make up a traditional piece of candy corn?Tap to reveal
Answer: White, orange and yellow
Q5.In which country was the phrase "trick or treat" first recorded in print?Tap to reveal
Answer: Canada
Q6.Which charity has been collecting coins from trick-or-treaters since 1950?Tap to reveal
Answer: UNICEF
Q7.What is the collective name for a group of witches?Tap to reveal
Answer: A coven
Round Two — Horror at the Movies
This is the round people cheat on, so say "phones away" once, clearly, before the first question. Collect sheets at the end and redistribute them. Read each answer aloud slowly enough for the marker to keep up, and add one line of context to the ones people argue about — the Shatner mask and the Best Picture question both reliably start a row. Announce cumulative scores after this round; that is your first real leaderboard and it sets the mood for the break.
The mask is worth the extra line. Tommy Lee Wallace bought a Captain Kirk mask cast from William Shatner's face for under two dollars, widened the eye holes and sprayed it bluish white; accounts differ over when the original mould was taken, so if someone presses, say that it is not settled. The Best Picture answer is settled: The Silence of the Lambs took five awards at the 1992 ceremony, including Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay, and remains the only horror film to have won Best Picture.
Q1.Who both directed and composed the score for the 1978 film Halloween?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Carpenter
Q2.Michael Myers' mask was made by modifying a shop-bought mask of which actor's face?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Shatner
Q3.Which actress played Laurie Strode in her film debut?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jamie Lee Curtis
Q4.Which 1991 film is the only horror film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Silence of the Lambs
Q5.Who played the possessed girl Regan in The Exorcist?Tap to reveal
Answer: Linda Blair
Q6.Which actor made his film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984?Tap to reveal
Answer: Johnny Depp
Q7.What is the name of the hotel in The Shining?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Overlook Hotel
Q8.What nickname is given to the killer's mask in the Scream films?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ghostface
Q9.What is the surname of the three witch sisters in Hocus Pocus?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sanderson
Q10.Which 1999 found-footage film was set in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Blair Witch Project
Round Three — Where Halloween Actually Comes From
Run this one straight after the break, when people are back in their seats and slightly louder. The difficulty steps up, but the answers are short enough that partial knowledge still scores. Tell teams to spell phonetically and mean it — accept "sow-in" for Samhain, "ofrenda" spelt any way that is recognisable, and "barmbrack" mangled however they like. If your room includes anyone Irish or Scottish, expect them to clean up here, which is fine: it evens out against Round Five.
Read the answers plainly and resist narrating a lineage the evidence does not support. Samhain is well documented; how much of the modern holiday descends from it is contested among historians, which is why the question says "considered". The same caution applies to apple bobbing: Pomona is the answer asked for, but the link is proposed rather than documented, and the earliest descriptions of the game in an Irish Halloween setting are eighteenth-century, in Charles Vallancey's Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis.
Q1."Halloween" is a contraction of which older name for 31 October?Tap to reveal
Answer: All Hallows' Eve
Q2.Which Christian feast day falls on 1 November?Tap to reveal
Answer: All Saints' Day
Q3.Which Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest is considered Halloween's ancestor?Tap to reveal
Answer: Samhain
Q4.In the medieval custom of "souling", what were the small cakes handed out called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Soul cakes
Q5.What is the Scottish and Irish term for going door to door in disguise?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guising
Q6.Apple bobbing is often linked to the festival of which Roman goddess of fruit and orchards?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pomona
Q7.What object hidden in an Irish Halloween barmbrack is said to predict marriage?Tap to reveal
Answer: A ring
Q8.Which two groups of 19th-century immigrants brought Halloween customs to North America?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Irish and the Scots
Q9.In Mexico's Day of the Dead, what is the household altar built for the dead called?Tap to reveal
Answer: An ofrenda
Q10.Which orange flower, known as cempasúchil, is used to guide the dead home?Tap to reveal
Answer: The marigold
Round Four — Monsters, Books and Legends
This is where you offer the joker if you are using one: each team may nominate a single round to be scored double, and it must be declared before the questions are read. Most teams will burn it here rather than risk the final round, which is exactly the decision you want them agonising over. Questions in this round reward one person at each table who read the books, so give a full thirty seconds — the tables will be arguing rather than guessing. Do not confirm or deny anything during the round, however loudly someone insists Frankenstein is the monster.
Two answers here are the ones teams talk about afterwards. Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at 18, in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati; the first edition appeared anonymously on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Accept 18 and nothing else. The naming question catches out everyone who has seen a film but not read the novel: Victor never names the creature, and Shelley's text calls him wretch, monster, creature, demon and fiend. Any name on a sheet has come from a later adaptation.
Q1.What nationality was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula?Tap to reveal
Answer: Irish
Q2.What is the name of the ship that carries Dracula to England?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Demeter
Q3.At which Yorkshire seaside town does that ship run aground?Tap to reveal
Answer: Whitby
Q4.Who leads the group of vampire hunters pursuing Count Dracula?Tap to reveal
Answer: Abraham Van Helsing
Q5.Which asylum inmate in Dracula eats insects to absorb their life?Tap to reveal
Answer: Renfield
Q6.What is the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Modern Prometheus
Q7.How old was Mary Shelley when she began writing Frankenstein?Tap to reveal
Answer: 18
Q8.In the novel, what name does Victor Frankenstein give his creature?Tap to reveal
Answer: None — the creature is never named
Q9.Who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?Tap to reveal
Answer: Washington Irving
Q10.In Slavic folklore, which witch lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs?Tap to reveal
Answer: Baba Yaga
Round Five — The Killer Round
Announce this one by name and warn the room that it is meant to hurt: a leading team scoring five out of ten here is doing well, and a table that scores seven has almost certainly won the night. Because scores are low, this round is where positions actually change, so mark it yourself at the front rather than trusting swapped sheets. Hold one question in reserve as a tiebreaker and use nearest-without-going-over: "In what year was Bram Stoker's Dracula published?" The answer is 1897, and it settles a two-way tie in about fifteen seconds.
Two of these will be challenged. Houdini did die on 31 October 1926 in Detroit, of peritonitis, but the story that a student's punches to his abdomen caused it is not established: opinion has been divided over whether the appendicitis was already under way, and much of the popular certainty comes from his insurance company accepting the punches and paying out. On Vlad, the answer stands whatever else is true, but the framing is loose: the Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller calls the link between the historical Vlad and the novel tenuous.
Q1.What is the name of the vampire in the 1922 German film Nosferatu?Tap to reveal
Answer: Count Orlok
Q2.Vlad the Impaler, an inspiration for Dracula, ruled which principality?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wallachia
Q3.In which year did the Salem witch trials take place?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1692–1693
The trials ran from February 1692 to May 1693, though all 20 executions took place in 1692
Q4.How many people were executed by hanging as a result of those trials?Tap to reveal
Answer: 19
Q5.Which Salem defendant was pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea?Tap to reveal
Answer: Giles Corey
Q6.Which famous escapologist died on 31 October 1926?Tap to reveal
Answer: Harry Houdini
Q7.Who spoke the closing narration on Michael Jackson's "Thriller"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vincent Price
Q8.Which word is never actually used to describe the undead in Night of the Living Dead?Tap to reveal
Answer: Zombie
Q9.In which year did "Monster Mash" reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1962
Q10.Which horror actor was Bobby "Boris" Pickett impersonating on that record?Tap to reveal
Answer: Boris Karloff
The Questions Teams Get Wrong, and the Ones Worth Holding Back
Six or seven questions across the five rounds tend to produce a blank line, and knowing which lets you decide in advance whether to keep them. In Round Two the Blair Witch question looks like a gift and is not: teams remember the film, which took around $249 million worldwide from a shoestring shoot, and not the town. In Round Four the Dracula ship is the classic split — plenty of teams know the Demeter, then name the wrong Yorkshire town for where it runs aground.
Round Five is meant to be hard, but two questions are hard for the wrong reason. The Salem count is pure recall: 19 is either known or guessed, and guesses cluster on 20, the figure you reach by adding Giles Corey to the nineteen hanged — he was pressed to death under stones in September 1692 for refusing to enter a plea, which is not a hanging. A fairer version asks how Corey died, because that can be reasoned towards. Monster Mash is the same: it topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the week of 20 October 1962, though British teams sometimes arrive sideways, since the BBC banned it that year as too morbid and it only reached number three in the UK on reissue in 1973.
For a tiebreak you want a number nobody knows exactly, so that nearest-without-going-over settles it in seconds. Three work: the year Dracula first went on sale (1897), the year Frankenstein was first published (1818), and the number of days it took to shoot the 1978 Halloween (20). Avoid anything already asked, and anything contested — which rules out that film's budget, given as $300,000 in some accounts and $325,000 in others.
Where the Popular Halloween Story Goes Wrong
Almost every confident claim about Halloween's origins is contested, garbled or unsupported, and a host who repeats one will be corrected in front of the room. The commonest is the straight line from Samhain to Halloween. Samhain is well documented as a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest, and the case that it shaped the holiday is a real scholarly position — but a position, not a settled fact. Others argue that Halloween developed principally as a Christian observance around All Hallows' Day and All Souls' Day, gathering local customs as it spread. The two accounts have not been reconciled, and individual practices are far better attested than the lineage joining them.
The same goes for the story that the Church moved All Saints' Day to 1 November to displace Samhain. What is documented is that commemorations of the saints were held on various dates, mostly in spring; that churches in Ireland and Northumbria were observing 1 November by around the year 800; and that the Frankish Empire adopted the date in 835. Why that date was chosen is where confidence evaporates: the proposals include the difficulty of housing summer pilgrims in Rome, and the fact that Germanic-speaking as well as Celtic-speaking peoples marked the dead at the onset of winter.
The turnip lantern is real and younger than it sounds. Hollowed turnips and mangel-wurzels carved with faces are documented in parts of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales in the nineteenth century, and the earliest recorded use of "jack-o'-lantern" for a carved vegetable rather than a marsh light dates from 1837. The Stingy Jack tale meant to explain it is far less securely dated: an 1836 Dublin item mentions the legend without any carved vegetable. In North America a carved pumpkin appears alongside Halloween in a Kingston, Ontario newspaper on 1 November 1866.
Trick-or-treating is three strands mashed into one. Souling — poor people, often children, going door to door at Allhallowtide collecting soul cakes in return for prayers for the dead — is attested at least as far back as the fifteenth century. Guising, children in disguise calling for food or coins, is recorded in Scotland at Halloween in 1895. The phrase itself is later and Canadian, appearing in Canadian newspapers in the 1910s and 1920s. That the three resemble one another is not the same as showing each descended from the last.
The claim worth actively knocking down is poisoned Halloween sweets. The sociologist Joel Best went through newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 and found no confirmed instance of a stranger killing a child with tampered Halloween treats. The cases that did happen are not the story people tell: the 1974 death of an eight-year-old in Deer Park, Texas was caused by his own father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, who poisoned Pixy Stix and gave them to other children to disguise it; a 1970 death in Detroit blamed on Halloween sweets turned out to be a child who had reached his uncle's heroin. Razor blades in apples belong to the same category, and "the Puritans banned Halloween" has a similar shape — Puritans in New England did oppose the holiday, which is not the same as a ban. Our [Halloween history trivia](/trivia/halloween-history-trivia/) page goes further into this.
Adapting the Night for a Classroom, a Party, an Office or a Family Table
A very small group — six or eight people in a living room — should not be split into teams of two. Run it as pairs against the host, and cut Round Five to five questions; a hard round in a small room produces silence rather than tension. A room of forty needs longer between questions than you expect, because the noise floor is higher and the back tables genuinely cannot hear.
A crowd three drinks in is a different job from one that walked in twenty minutes ago. Attention shortens, volume rises, and tolerance for a long history round disappears. Bring Round Two forward, because films are the round a loud room will still play, and cut Round Three to six questions rather than trying to hold the room through ten. Announce standings more often, and skip the context notes, which land as a lecture at that hour.
For a classroom, Rounds One and Three are the useful ones and Round Two is not: the horror questions assume films most school-age pupils have not seen and in many cases should not. Round Three works as a history lesson with a scoreboard attached, especially paired with the section above, asking pupils which claims they think are solid. For anyone younger than secondary school, our [Halloween trivia for kids](/trivia/halloween-trivia-for-kids/) page has age-banded rounds instead.
A workplace quiz has two constraints a pub quiz does not: it must finish when it said it would, and it must not humiliate anyone in front of their manager. Cut to Rounds One, Two and Three, build teams that cross departments, and skip the joker, which rewards confidence over knowledge. At a family table with a wide age range, run Round One for everyone, then let the adults play Rounds Four and Five while the children mark: handing a nine-year-old the answer sheet solves the age-range problem outright.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does this Halloween quiz take to run?
Budget 75 to 90 minutes. The 47 questions take about 45 minutes at a sensible pace with each one read twice, marking adds roughly five minutes between rounds, and a break after Round Three adds ten to fifteen. If you need it shorter, cut Round Four entirely rather than trimming questions from every round: losing a whole round keeps the difficulty curve intact, thinning each one flattens it.
How do I score it, and what happens if two teams tie?
One point per question, 47 available, no half points and no marks for spelling. Standings are read after Rounds Two, Three and Five only. For ties, use a number question that was not asked during the night, scored nearest without going over: the year Dracula first went on sale (1897), the year Frankenstein was first published (1818), or the number of days it took to shoot the 1978 Halloween (20).
What team size works best, and who does the marking?
Four to six people. Below four the specialist rounds feel unfair, because a small team either contains the person who read Dracula or it does not; above six, half the table stops contributing. Teams mark each other's sheets, passed one table to the left after each round, and you check the totals at the end. Nothing needs printing: teams need paper and a pen, and you read everything off a phone.
Can I adjust the difficulty for a mixed crowd?
Yes, and the round structure is built for it. If the crowd is casual, move four questions from Round Five into Round Two and replace them with easier ones from Round One — the night still escalates, from a lower base. If the crowd is competitive, swap Rounds Three and Four so the history round comes later, and keep the joker, which forces teams to gamble on where their knowledge actually is.
Is there a printable version, and do I need to sign up for anything?
No signup, no account and nothing to install. Every question here is printed with its answer beside it, so printing the page gives you a host sheet and an answer key in one — print a single copy for yourself and hand the teams blank paper. If you only have time for three rounds, keep One, Two and Five: that is 27 questions and about 45 minutes including marking.
